Caravaggio

Caravaggio (1986)

His passion came with a price.

A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.

Date of release
1986-08-29
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (166)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Drama, History, Romance
Director
Derek Jarman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Silver Bear

Caravaggio is a 1986 British historical drama film directed by Derek Jarman. The film is a fictionalised retelling of the life of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Production

The idea for a film on the life of the Italian painter Caravaggio was proposed to Jarman by the art dealer Nicholas Ward Jackson. At the time, Jarman knew little about Caravaggio’s life, but was drawn to the painter’s radical reworking of Christian iconography, particularly his use of contemporary figures as sacred subjects, such as portraying a street prostitute as Mary Magdalene.

While developing the project, Jarman drew parallels between Caravaggio and the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his memoir Dancing Ledge, Jarman wrote: “Had Caravaggio been reincarnated in this century it would have been as a film-maker, Pasolini”. During this period, Jarman also wrote an unproduced screenplay, P.P.P.

Jarman wrote the first draft of the screenplay in Rome in 1978. Over the following years he produced approximately sixteen subsequent drafts, during which time he experienced considerable difficulty securing financing for the project. One draft, dated 1982, featured a metafictional framing device in which the filmmaker “Derek Jarman” is persuaded to make a pornographic film based on the life of Caravaggio.

During the extended development period before the film was eventually financed by the British Film Institute, Jarman remained active across multiple artistic disciplines. He painted, directed music videos including Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English (1979), designed sets for Ken Russell’s stage production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1982), published his memoir Dancing Ledge (1984), and returned to making Super 8 films.

Jarman auditioned actors in his flat, filming them on video as part of the casting process. He cast Nigel Terry in the title role, in part because of Terry’s resemblance to the only known painted portrait traditionally identified as Caravaggio. The roles of Ranuccio and Lena were given to Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton respectively, both of whom were relative newcomers.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended